How to structure your website for higher rankings on search engines

A solid website
structure helps search engines to understand your website content. The easier it is to find out what your web pages are about, the more likely it is that your web pages will get high rankings.

A well organized website helps your
users to find what they are looking for, and it helps search engines to
understand the purpose of your website.

Flat websites vs. deep
websites

The two most common website navigation
structures are flat sites and deep sites. Flat websites are websites
that try to make each web page available with very few clicks. Deep
websites are websites that use long paths to access specific pages on
the site.

A deep website structure enables you
to create very exact and targeted topical pages on your website. The
disadvantage of a deep website structure is that website visitors and
search engine crawlers take longer to find the content they are looking
for.

A flat website structure makes it
easier for website visitors and search engines to find all pages of
your website. The fewer pages your visitors have to go through before
finding the content they are looking for, the better.

The best structure for your website

Help your website visitors and search engine bots to get maximum results. All pages on your website
should be accessible with a maximum of four clicks from the home page
of your site.

In addition, the navigational
elements on your website reflect the importance of the linked pages. It usually makes sense to create
your website structure like this:

Create an overview of all pages of
your website.

Break the content into core
categories and create a top level navigation that hold the different
content types of your site.

Create logical sub categories.

If necessary, create another sub
category level.

Link the targeted pages from the
sub category pages.

If you think about creating a public
sitemap of your website so that your visitors can find all pages then your website navigation is not good
enough.

Although a sitemap can help search engines and website visitors
to find pages on your site, the regular navigation of your website
should be so good that a sitemap is not needed.

Check your website now

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler
can help you to get the number of clicks that are necessary to reach
individual pages on your website (‘click depth’).

In addition, the website audit tool
checks many more things that influence the position of your web pages
on Google and other search engines. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now: